CS PhD alumnus (20012007)
Advisors: Bob Harper, Karl Crary
Phone: Who uses phones??

Hi I finished grad school! Now I'm just a guy with a PhD, some papers, and a bunch of projects.

I love programming languages to the max. For myresearch I worked on the ConCert Project,eventually designing and implementing a typed programming language fordistributed programming called ML5. It's basedon modal logic and I formalized lots of the proofs in Twelf so they can be verifiedby our patient and careful friends, computers. Lots of people don'tcare about programming languages, possibly because they think that alllanguages are the same, or they don't want help from their patient andcareful friends, or have never used an optimizing compiler for ahigh-level language, or they suspect that programming is mostly abouttaping together programs that other peoplewrote. I am fairly certain that I have more fun programming than thesepeople, which makes me sad.

I love to make things. For many years, I used tocrank out loads of TrueTypefonts. I bet you have seen them on posters or T-shirts and noteven known it. I also spent a long time writing andrecording music in profusion formy album-a-dayproject or other bands. Like for example I like to makeintricate Nintendo-esquesongs with primitive waveforms, or bedroom acoustic guitarwith my homebrewplugins.

One of the best things about grad school was that ifyou get your work done then you get to do other stuff too. Like forexample in 2003 I wrote a novel called Name ofAuthor by Title of Book in a month. The next year I wroteHis Sophomoric Effort which Iwould even not be embarrassed if you read.

Some know me formy software that learns to playNintendo games and my video series showing its adventures. I madethem for the prestigiousconference SIGBOVIK. I also figuredout how to automatically make NESgames 3D and do seemingly impossible tricksby reverse-emulatingNES hardware.

Other hacks with videosinclude a portmanteau of everyword in English, a C compiler thatproduces executable text files,and unlikely bikes.

Exploring the dizzying depths of uselessness, Ionce AlphabetizedStar Wars. Disturbingly, it might be my most famousaccomplishment.

More recently I have beenmaking gamesin 48h periods for an event called Ludum Dare. You can play these inyour browser. I'm most proudof T in Y World (theme"Tiny World") and DragonDrop (theme "Minimalism"there's more to it if you think todismiss it). Entire Screen of OneGame (theme "Entire Game on One Screen") unexpectedly explodedhundreds of thousands of brains (and ended up inthe CentrePompidou!). ButIs Lands? (theme "Islands");Disco? Very! (theme "Discovery");Priority Cats (theme "It's dangerous to go alone. Take this!");One of the best birthdays (theme "Evolution");Escape Cod (theme "Escape");Point One Hurts (theme "10 Seconds");Age of Umpires (theme "You are the villain");Single Dragon (theme "You only get one");Connector World (theme "Connected Worlds");andRunning out of Space (eponymous theme)may entertain you as well.

Escape is across-platform puzzle game I made over the course of 20 years (!).It's like a push-the-blocks game with other gadgets and a built-ineditor and online features and a lot of really creative puzzles thatpeople have submitted.

Spare cycles during class were directed into my notes,which are a stream-of-consciousness circus of typography andcartooning. They're collected in Illustrated Notesfrom Computer Science for your amusement. For a whileI would upload my photographsbut now I just keep them on my computer and never show them to anyone.

Another weird thing is that I'm tryingto run the length of every street inPittsburgh.

snoot.org is ahighly interactive web page I started ten years ago, and occasionallywork on.

Here are some high-speedmovies, some old MIDI thing,a program for making Nintendo music out of MIDIfiles, icon emporium, a game we made for OLPC called Headcat, my stillborn proposal for a new CSDlogo, how to fix MP3 players ifyou're me or impatient like me, hi-respictures of me, some kind ofhigh-performance computational genomics tool, and all the talks I ever gave.

Back when I was an undergraduate at CMU, I made adifferent web pagethat has lots of other stuff on it and is kind of embarrassing.

And finally, though this page is rather static, Ihave a weblog called Tom 7Radar which I keep up-to-date with my adventures and projects.You can also find me on Twitter as @tom7.